Diabetes is a disease in which the body does not produce an adequate amount of insulin or does not properly respond to the insulin produced. This results in an unbalanced blood glucose concentration (hyper- or hypoglycemia) leading to severe consequences such as ketoacidosis (diabetic coma), vascular complications as well as loss of consciousness or seizures. In order to maintain a healthy blood glucose concentration, patients usually keep a strict diet in combination with selective boluses of insulin. A bolus of insulin needs to be adjusted to the individual human body to provide an appropriate amount and distribution of insulin. Whether or not the amount and distribution of insulin are appropriate strongly depends on several factors such as the quantity and type of food and physical activity, e.g., exercise, stress or illness. Hence, the necessary amount of insulin varies depending on the patient's physical condition. To respectively serve the appropriate amount of insulin, the patient's response to certain factors like a meal needs to be considered. In addition to the amount and distribution of an insulin bolus, the timing of the bolus is of particular importance.
Existing methods to deal with monitoring the glucose concentration usually comprise the use of spot monitoring of blood glucose with a strip meter or tape cassette or the use of a continuous blood glucose monitoring device. Further, it is known to display the measured data in the form of a glucose concentration excursion curve. This provides rather exact and complete but more or less raw data, which are complicated to be interpreted by a patient or his or her health care provider (HCP).
When conventional methods are applied, the patient or his or her HCP respectively gets information about the glucose concentration excursion of a predefined period of time, e.g., of the last 12 or 24 hours. Moreover, the measurements usually do not consider the individual timing of relevant events such as physical activities or eating habits of a patient but measure over a fixed and predetermined period of time.
Glucose concentration is a value which is influenced by parameters such as the amount, distribution and timing of a bolus of insulin as well as by meals or physical activities of the patient. Said conventional measuring methods can only show absolute values of the respective blood glucose concentration at a specific time or within a specific period of time without taking other parameters such as timing of a meal or physical activity into account.
Any predetermined and fixed timing of a continuous measuring cycle or spot measurement, which is not synchronized with all influences to the blood glucose concentration excursion, is unable to react to the patient's individual habits. An intuitive analysis of measured values therefore is not possible if only the previously described conventional measuring methods are used. Even though the fact that e.g., a meal has been ingested can be seen from the blood glucose concentration excursion, its precise timing does not come out of the measured data. Therefore, in order to consider this timing, a parallel log of events with their respective time becomes necessary.
Thus, applying conventional monitoring and analyzing methods, an efficient determination of the right choice of the amount, distribution and timing of a bolus with respect to a specific meal or a specific activity and the like is only possible if the patient shows a strict discipline in matters of nutrition, sports and other physical activities or if he or she adheres to a strict logging of any possibly influencing event.
For a useful therapy and regimen respectively, a wide knowledge of a specific human body's response to a bolus of insulin as well as to nutrition and physical activities is crucial. Therefore therapies which are based on averaged data or a fixed measurement program are not satisfyingly matching the needs and requirements of an individual patient.